Open Web Biennial 2003, Istanbul Museum

[anna balint]

Web Biennial is a contemporary art exhibition which will be realised exclusively on 
the World Wide Web (W.W.W.) in every two years. Currently the Web Biennial 2003 is a 
work in progress. The previews will start in March 2003 and the exhibition starts in 
June 2003. The exhibition will be online till the end of the year 2003. The Biennial 
has been anounced and will be realised, produced, exhibited and than documented 
exclusively on the W.W.W. The project not only aims to offer an alternative approach 
for exhibiting online art but also an alternative approach for exhibiting art 
online.

In the exhibition all projects will be presented as diverse and unlimited as 
possible. The exhibition portal will contain hypertexts that will lead into 
individual sites of the artists or groups. The main server will not host any 
information other than the information on the directory page. In this regard the 
project differentiates from many other online museums and galleries but at the same 
time resembles other web formats such as link lists or web rings. However in case of 
the Web Biennial all the participants are required to change the source code of 
their index pages and add the texts "Web Biennial 2003- Name of the Artist- Name of 
the Project" in their titles. Hence these voluntary re- coding underlines the 
participation and a different form of community creation.

The de-centralised structure of the exhibition has many disadvantages but also 
advantages. First of all, it enabled us to carry no limitation on media, size or the 
number of the artists participating in the exhibition. Still we needed a custom made 
search engine to navigate through this complex structure. The embedded words in the 
search parameters "Web+ Biennial+2003" and title tags helps us search for a 
clustered sample of the W.W.W.

For the project, all anouncements were made online and the calls were posted on free 
public domains like rhizome.org, nihayeticimdesin.com, artswire.org and 
absolutearts.org/. We used e-mail groups to distribute the information. We tried to 
reach all artists who are active or who wants to be active on the WWW. After seven 
months of online announcements, through September 2002 to March 2003, 42 artists 
from 13 countries responded to our call, they send us their URL's and changed their 
source codes.

The artists and groups and the names of their works that are listed in the 
"preview"section of the Web Biennial are: Ali Miharbi: brush 1.1/ Contiguo, Cabrera, 
Debona: Paul Vater/ Bovey Lee: Ultimate Life/ T.W.C.D.C.: ACOS v2.0/ 
CarianaCarianne:Two Minded Chat/ Melinda Rackham: __line__/ Leftloft: Daily 
Distillery/ Sal Randolph: Free Manifesta/ Stefan Sun: Figurative Words/ Paul 
Catanese: Invisible Maps/ redcaiman: Im an Animal/ Viktor Vina: Flux/ Katie Bush: 
destroy evil/ dlsan: HyperMacbeth/ ravi jain: Gallery of Transportation/ Jody 
Zellen: Crowds and Power/ Matteo Peterlini: doppiamano/ sante scardillo: LIFESTYLE/ 
melody owen: Deadly Nightshade/ enrico mitrovich: Obsolescence of G.U.I./ Elizabeth 
Bajbor: Digital Gobelins/ Judson: THE PASSAGE OF TIME/ D. Alvarez Olmedeo: 
Conexiones/ Paula Cordova: Kronos/ Jillian Mc Donald: HomeLikeNoPlace/ Agricola de 
Cologne: Violence Online Festival/ Kate Armstrong: The Relation Papers/ Joddy 
Zellen: Crowds of Power/ T. Vujinovic, Z. Simcic: Hardbody/ zhangming hong: zp/ 
Michaël Sellam: Le Cri/ Adad Hannah: Stills/ Marina Zerbarini: Latido/ Gabriel 
Otero: Estado Flarmanico/ gianluca costantini: oracle/ R. Miranda Zuñiga: Vagamundo/ 
Victor Liu: delter/ Aleksandra Glokobar: Hello my friend!.../ babel: Patinage/ 
Luigia Cardarelli: Fragments/ Grant Corbishley: podmedia/ Andrej Tisma: REMEMBER 
CRIMES

Web Biennial is an 'open' exhibition which means that the participating artists were 
not chosen or invited by any one. All the applications to the exhibition were 
accepted to create a non-hierarchic form of a collective. We only had to exclude 
commercial sites. We believe that at the end, not only the individual works but the 
exhibiton process itself became an example for networked communication and exchange.

Last but not the least, istanbulmuseum.org/ which organises this exhibition, is a 
web based virtual museum. It is an artist run independent organisation with no 
physical exhibition space. There are no sponsors other than the artists themselves, 
involved in this project. Still istanbulmuseum.org will not be the only location for 
the exhibition. We will create mirror sites with different URL's and we are 
expecting others to create mirror sites for us so that the de-centralisation 
prevails.

The Biennials are mostly named after the cities. For example Venice Biennial is 
named after Venice and Istanbul Biennial has been named after Istanbul. In contrast 
Web Biennial will not be located at any specific city but it will be spread through 
the web. Therefor we can argue that the Web Biennial will not only help to 
legitimise web based art such as web-art or net-art but also question the current 
Biennial models and it will help to strengthen the core notions of W.W.W. itself.

 

On Going Call for proposal for Web Art till the end of 2003. The  galleries will be 
organised on first come first serve bases. Web Biennial 2003 will be realised and 
exhibited exclusivly on the WWW. No limitation on media, size or the number of the 
artists paricipating but projects should be send to us as URL's. 

1) We require every proposal to have a single URL and a custom title as below: If 
you do not want to modify your index page, send us the URL of a redirection or a 
jump page. Consult a web master if necessary. 2) Only one project from each artist, 
please!. 4) No Portfolio or commercial sites, please! 5) We will make an online 
gallery each time we receive 41 different submissions. 6) Our portal will be ready 
by June. 

Send proposals to: webbiennial at yahoo.com attention Feyza Kucukaltintas.